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We're going to have the house repainted soon and I think it's time to rip it all down. Before I make a mistake, I'm trying to think of reasons why I wouldn't want to do that.
I would rip it out especially if it RG-59 coaxial. It's like a home wired with "station wire" for the phones, the first pair is green (tip) and red (ring); the second is black (tip) and yellow (ring). The way you remember this is that there are two holidays: Christmas and Halloween. This standard is only for analog voice so you are better off replacing or destroying the wires even though they still work.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The TiVo box that our cable installed in our house in 2012 requires a coaxial cable to go to the "slave" box in each room, but that is because the "slaves" have tuners. Most modern systems put up to 6 tuners in the mast box, and the "slaves" around the house use one of those 6 tuners when they are being used. When they are not being used to watch live TV they are available for the DVR. The CableCards from the cable company can only handle 6 tuners, so you don't normally go above that.
HOW IT RELATES TO YOUR WIRING
Modern equipment with a central tuning only requires that the "slave boxes" be connected with CAT5e or "ethernet" wires which are about the same thickness as phone wires. Sometimes the slaves can be hooked up wirelessly, but the connection is not as reliable. So you don't need the coaxial.
CAUTIONS
When you hook it up this way, you may run out of ports on your router. A typical router has 4 ports. If you have a lot of televisions and a computer hooked up you may want to use more than the 4 ports. This problem is not very expensive as you can get a bigger router, but just be aware that your cable company probably doesn't have one to rent to you.
There is a way to wire those slaves using coaxial cable. It is called MoCa or "Multimedia Over Cable". The practical reason for this standard is many homes are already wired with coaxial and they don't have ethernet. I have noticed that the customer service department at my cable company says that you have to have coaxial to every television, but the technicians are usually smart enough to know that is not true with the equipment that is relatively new (2014 or later).
POSSIBLE SUGGESTION
Burial Grade RG-6 is about $10-$12 for 50 feet (about 25% more than regular grade). A lot of people bury the cable coming in from the utility pole. Usually it is connected at the utility pole with a regular F-type connector. The electric wires are much higher up on a utility pole so you don't get electrocuted by touching the utility poles. The burial grade can be buried in the lawn without a PVC conduit. If you are in the process of cleaning up wires hanging from your house, it might be a simple matter to do this at the same time. It also means less issue with branches in a thunderstorm. There are youtube videos with suggestions on how to drive pipes under a sidewalk or driveway without having to tear them up with a jackhammer.
Burying cable can often be done with a good trowel and less than $50 in cable. It is much easier than burying secondary electric wires which will cost you at a minimum of $1000 fee for the electric utility. On top of their fee you must do a lot of work yourself which probably involves renting equipment.
You can hang a switch off the existing port(s) on the cablemodem
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph_Kirk
In my last house, which had accessible basement and attic areas, I did put both Cat 6 and coax into every room--including the bathrooms, laundry room, and garage. I also ran it through PVC in most areas so that it could be pulled and rewired in the future. I ran all the lines back to a data closet in the basement where the routers sat.
Having PVC in the walls with each room having a home run to a central closet is great! This makes it much easier to run the right wiring where you need it, and to upgrade later.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PacoMartin
When you hook it up this way, you may run out of ports on your router. A typical router has 4 ports. If you have a lot of televisions and a computer hooked up you may want to use more than the 4 ports. This problem is not very expensive as you can get a bigger router, but just be aware that your cable company probably doesn't have one to rent to you.
You don't actually need a "bigger router", instead you can get a multiport switch and plug it into the router, this gives you plenty of extra ports:
If you spend a few bucks for a gigabit (1000Mbit) switch, you can move big files between (wired) computers faster than using the ports built into the router or wireless.
On a related note, check with your cable provider to see if they have a list of supported "routers (cablemodems) that you can use with their service. Buying your own cablemodem instead of renting theirs will almost always pay for itself within a year.
Yes, where the cables feed into the rooms there is your standard coax end. They all then feed into the house in the cellar but I haven't quite figured out where they all come together. A bit of a mystery.
I couldn't believe how much cable was in my house. It was four deep in places and just ran around in circles. The point of entry had obviously been changed more than once. There was hundreds of RG-59 coaxial and splitters everywhere and a MoCa bridge. At one point it was plugged in to some kind of amplifier. It took hours and hours to pull it all out so that it could all be replaced.
When I was all done I had one line that entered the house, a single 4 way splitter that went to 3 televisions and a modem. All but once cable is RG-6. My internet signal was much stronger since there were no unnecessary splits. If my "slaves" were more up to date, I would only need a two way split to modem and main DVR box. But my cable wants to charge me more money to upgrade the slaves. From the photo, the placement of my MoCa filters is very clear, one is on point of entry and the other is leading to the modem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nonesuch
You don't actually need a "bigger router", instead you can get a multiport switch and plug it into the router, this gives you plenty of extra ports:
If you spend a few bucks for a gigabit (1000Mbit) switch, you can move big files between (wired) computers faster than using the ports built into the router or wireless.
I received the E1200 from the cable company gratis, but it is only $40 retail. Yes, there are better solutions, but I was just trying to figure out why the cable company still uses coaxial and MoCa when Cat5e is so much easier to pull. The only tangible reason I could come up with is their cheap routers might not work if you add enough televisions.
Last edited by PacoMartin; 07-07-2016 at 06:57 PM..
A young family with four children where the couple is in their 30's moved in next door. Even though the house was built in 1954 and rooms were added in the 1980s we couldn't find any wiring in the house other than coaxial that that enters into the attic. The walls are lathe and plaster (not drywall).
I know that the people who lived there since 1999 didn't watch television. They used to hook up a router and wireless access point in the attic for their internet. But it looks as if there was never any TV watchers since the home was built.
It does occur to me that you can hook up your main 6 tuner DVR unit in the attic where there are no televisions. Normally as a cost saving major you plug in a television. But if you don't want to be bothered running coaxial it is optional.
You will need a slave at each television. Examples of "slaves" are could be TiVo mini's or Amazon Firesticks. The way our cable company works if you buy your own TiVo equipment instead of rent it, then you lose the ability to watch VOD.
I just thought I would mention it on the outside chance that running coaxial from the point of entry to a location where you want to put your TV is difficult.
Do you replace it with good wire? We bought a rehab and didn't notice until we moved in that all comm cabling had been removed, including telephone cabling. I didn't consider that a good deed.
No, I don't replace anything. The junction/meter boxes are still on the side of the house, but there's no way for me to know if a future buyer/tenant is going to want cable, DSL, or satellite. A recent example - I rehabbed a rental 4 yrs ago, ripped out miles of wire & jacks from 30 yrs of installers gone wild. I got the rental back from the tenant yesterday, there was a bundle of 5 coax-y looking wires running 3/4 of the way around the house, up & over the front door, just looked ghetto - one of the wires said "mono price.com" on it, which could be great stuff, or garbage. One was lan cable, another was regular coax, one went back to an antenna, one looked like speaker-wire - there was even a network cable run to the garage door opener so the tenant could check the status of the door with his iPhone.. The tenant took the interface-box with him, but left the network cable hanging in the garage..
I *do* disclose that there's no phone/satellite/coax/lan cabling in the house - this last tenant was geeky enough that he would have run his own cables anyway.
I honestly would *much* rather split a bill with a tenant for new wire that they have installed by the provider of their choosing than listen to grumbling about where the phone jacks or TV jacks are, or deal with phantom speed issues due to crappy coax/lan cable/phone line that someone installed xx years ago. As a landlord, I have to maintain anything I provide, so I provide nothing & speed/connection/fuzzy picture issues are between the provider & the tenant.
It would pizz me off if I bought a house and found out it had been wired with cat5, TV coax and phone lines and it had all been pulled out. All those cabled can and are still being used by many. It's all still in use in my house. DSL over phone line is the only internet available on my street.
The land line phone does not go out in a power outage and is more reliable for my alarm system. I have free local TV reception from an antenna distributed through out the house on RG6/RG59 coax. My satellite TV box is also distributed on the coax to any tv in the house.
It's just wasteful to pull out low risk low voltage wiring that is already run.
We're going to have the house repainted soon and I think it's time to rip it all down. Before I make a mistake, I'm trying to think of reasons why I wouldn't want to do that.
If you aren't going to use it for pay cable/satellite TV one thing I can think of you might want to use it for is OTA TV. You can get one good outside antenna and use those cable to route it to all the TV's. This is ideal if you have poor reception.
It would pizz me off if I bought a house and found out it had been wired with cat5, TV coax and phone lines and it had all been pulled out. All those cabled can and are still being used by many. It's all still in use in my house. DSL over phone line is the only internet available on my street.
The land line phone does not go out in a power outage and is more reliable for my alarm system. I have free local TV reception from an antenna distributed through out the house on RG6/RG59 coax. My satellite TV box is also distributed on the coax to any tv in the house.
It's just wasteful to pull out low risk low voltage wiring that is already run.
well - different strokes, as a landlord it's legally better for me to rip out all the wires & let the tenant & provider sort it out if there are problems with the signal. If I leave in what could be a 30 year old phone wire & the tenant has connection problems, I get stuck with the bill for any needed diagnosis or repair (and it's not like tenants are willing to pay any extra for phone wiring, most use cells as primary anyways) I'm not in the tv business, I rent houses.
If/when those homes get sold, the wires will still get ripped out because they're ugly & distracting. It's no different than homes that are "staged" professionally - in almost every case, there isn't a tv in the main "tv" room, tv's are ugly & you're not selling a tv, you're selling a house. And, same deal - if you buy a house from me & you really gotta have cat 5 or dsl wiring when you move in, I'll gladly give you a credit & you can pick the installer & *they* can provide the warranty & take care of any service issues.
When we bought our house we had 17 cable connections running from a box mounted on the side of the house. Looked terrible. You have the line coming off the pole entering the box on the outside of the house. Then inside the box some splitter's that had all these cables entering the house at the top of the eaves and then in the attic splitting off to where ever they terminated each line.
We only wanted cable in each bedroom and in the living room, for a total of 5 termination points. It was a mess to clean up but looks nice now. We also removed all the old phone lines running into the house. At first that was because our cable company offers the phone from the cable modem. Now it is because we never use a land line. They had phone lines running on the outside of the house entering the home. I did not like how it looked.
If you aren't going to use it for pay cable/satellite TV one thing I can think of you might want to use it for is OTA TV. You can get one good outside antenna and use those cable to route it to all the TV's. This is ideal if you have poor reception.
If the home is nicely wired with coaxial or station wire there is no compelling reason to pull out the wires. As you said there are multiple uses including OTA.
But in many cases the wiring is an absolute kludge. It's ugly, it doubles back on itself, it's impossible to diagnose problems. Some of the phone wiring in my house is from the 1920's, and it wasn't even color coded. In particular wiring hanging around the outside of a house is very unsightly.
I still have some very old jacks in the house where it would have involved tearing out the ceiling to change out the wires.
But if it's ugly there is usually not a compelling reason to keep it. The resale value is more dependent on it looking pretty than it is on having a wire somewhere.
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You can hang a switch off the existing port(s) on the cablemodem
A completely non wired home
